Just watched this video, and decided to share it. I was pretty upset about how Lost ended. It just seemed like a big letdown with so many question still not answered, and the way Locke died, and Kate not being a candidate, and especially, the whole Jacob thing. Like it was so Cain and Abel, bad brother versus good brother. It was just unoriginal. I don’t know why but I expected there would be a reason the island was the way it was. I loved the show, but felt like they really should have just been dead the whole time. It actually would have been a bigger twist to me,

Did you guys like the way the show ended? How would you have ended it? Or how did you think it should have ended?

I am not allowed to rob a liquor store anymore because I met my own personal Jesus.

Spoiler: notes

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I think the show fell victim to trying to outsmart and stay ahead of the fans to the detriment of the story. Every season required a gimmick and time travel and purgatory really didn't work for me at all. I was slightly emotional at Jacks death but didn't feel anything with Jin and Sun.

I think the final season should have been gimmick free and told in linear fashion with rare flashbacks to explain Jacob and Esau.

I voted "No. They left too many unanswered questions. It felt rushed and chaotic."

I did pretty much hate the ending, but I wouldn't say that it "made no sense." To me it mostly just felt cliched and amateurish, and did not really provide closure or a resolution to the show as a whole. It mostly only addressed plot elements that weren't introduced until Season 6, and the objective shouldn't have been to resolve Season 6, the objective should have been to provide a satisfying ending to the entire 6-season story.

In my opinion, for the ending of Lost to have been satisfying, it needed to in some way address the fundamental, "guys, where are we?" question posed in The Pilot. That is to say, it needed to address the true origins and nature of the Island itself. Sure, we got "Across the Sea," but that was the origin of Jacob (a character introduced in Season 3) and MiB (a character introduced at the very end of Season 5). The Island, set up as a character in its own right early in the series, didn't really get elaborated on much. Just some vague talk from "Mother" about "the light."

Locke being my favorite character, I also feel like his arc was mishandled in the second-half of Season 5, and throughout Season 6. Having MiB walk around with Locke's face just so they could keep Terry O'Quinn on the show didn't do it for me.

In their foreword for "Lost Encyclopedia," Darlton say that the story of Lost was like an iceberg, with most of its details and backstory remaining hidden below the water. So, maybe those answers do exist somewhere in the minds of Damon and Carlton. I would like to think they had something in mind in terms of where the Island came from, and why it can do all the stuff it can do. They say they didn't reveal all that on purpose, so that we could continue to think about it, and have our own ideas about what it all means... and I do. Still, at some point it would be nice to get the "official" version.

I was not entirely satisfied by it. Yet, since LOST ended, there is no show I have thought about more. Specifically, the way it ended forced me to reexamine my understanding of storytelling and the idea of ambiguity vs certainty. After understanding more about Damon Lindelof's approach to "answers", though the Leftovers, for example, and comparing the way LOST handled these issues with other shows/movies/books, I now believe that LOST did something truly unique. I believe the show as a whole accomplished a sort of multi-level examination of human uncertainty and our place in the universe. I could go on about it forever, so I'll stop there.

I generally find that analysis of the show's ending is generally rather shallow, and that is reflected in the choices above.

Also, Locke's ending, as disappointing as it is, is brutally impressive. I rarely see a "good" main character like that get treated so horribly by a show.

I'm not sure that anybody could have been "totally satisfied," and i'm wiling to admit that certain elements were handled poorly, but overall i felt that it was a very good ending to a great series.

It's understandable that Locke fans in particular were disappointed, but the way his character ended spoke volumes to the greater realities of credulous but well-intentioned people in the real world. Not just Locke's ending, though, but elements of his story throughout: he was taken for a proverbial ride by a phone sex operator who herself even started to feel guilty for how cruelly she'd treated him, but she didn't return a dime nor actually deliver on any of the emotional or other investments which he'd made; his own father used his emotional vulnerability to steal an internal organ, then crippled him when John refused to accept Coop's true nature - Coop couldn't deal with the idea that Locke had been conned more by the faked emotional closeness rather than the faked wealth. Locke continually turned the other cheek to the world, only to be hurt again and again, being cruelly used by desperate person after desperate person. This was a perfect set-up for Locke to be seen as an analog for Jesus in a show with so many overt religious themes. I understand the frustration of the Locke fans that the writers used that set-up for a bait-and-switch, but in my own opinion Locke's ending was utterly consistent with his story arc as a whole.

I refuse to see the "Flash-Sideways" parts of Season 6 as being a gimmicky trick or a despicable lie. Instead i see those sequences as a peek into what our characters' lives would've been like without the influences of Jacob, the Island, Charles Widmore, DI/Mittelos, etc. And with that frame of reference i very much enjoy the Sideways glimpses.

I agree with 3519273540 that most analyses of the end of the show are shallow, and i think that's because lots of people were unsatisfied that things didn't work out the way that those individuals wanted, rather than trying to objectively criticize the work of art as a whole.

I could turn this post into an unreadably long defense of the series as a whole and the ending in particular, but i won't. I'd just like to end with a reminder that "I didn't like it" isn't the same thing as "It was bad."

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Originally Posted by Maturin

I've always appreciated your restraint, Mo

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Originally Posted by vonnegut

Mo, I you

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Originally Posted by Bee

I am not allowed to rob a liquor store anymore because I met my own personal Jesus.

Spoiler: notes

gift cards make great gifts both for shoppers who are lazy and/or have a lot of gifts to buy. They're also a shrewd choice if there are individuals in your life for whom it is difficult to shop. When bought through the astore, they also help support this site, which isn't self-sufficient and doesn't hold fund-raisers or any of that other crap.

Lost fell apart for me long before season 6. I felt the writing became an effort for each episode to upstage the one that came directly before. Moments became better than the overall story.

I like Mr. Mo's description of season 6's flash sideways as a what if scenario. But if that was going to be case then go all the way with it and perhaps have the story later shift out of one of the character's head when he/she could no longer reconstruct history based on their own needs to erase or obscure trauma from his/her memories. In other words tighten the story.

Sun and Jin and Sayid deaths were absolutely disgraceful. Part of me wants to say the writers would never have done that with the lead white characters but maybe my perspective reflects the times we live in. But throughout the season Lost I think really didn't do very well with minority characters at least in terms of playing out their stories. Lost really became the Jack Kate and Sawyer show. And this model of white characters first is why I gave up on Fear The Walking Dead almost immediately. The last thing I wanted to see was another set of white leads who btw in FTWD started off as totally boring in their own right. The better characters/actors were the two black dudes who were killed off right away.

The very ending and by that I mean the last few scenes became a cast party of all the characters standing together as spirits as though nothing all that bad had happened. But the biggest fault with that scene (I mean besides its absurdity) was that all of the cast wasn't there. I mean was the budget so low then? Meanwhile there was the final Jack and Vincent scene which ended the show where it started. This I liked as a concept---and talking about explaining things this was probably why Vincent was kept on the Island all this time because the show wanted that scene from the very beginning---but Jack as a character became so lame that having a different character substitute for Jack would have made more sense. For instance why not get Vincent off the Island entirely and be with an adult Walt and have Walt (alive) stare up at the clouds while one of which mysteriously passes overhead in the shape of backwards Australia? If everyone else was dead, forget that cocktail cast party and worry about the living.

Locke. oh Locke Locke Locke. He reminded me of someone who was always destroyed by life and rose back up from the ashes only to be destroyed again. The Island was a good place for him. He could reinvent himself and attempt to become a king of his own destiny. Trouble is Locke didn't live in a vacuum and he never rose from the concept of needing other people's approval or the companionship of believing in something bigger than himself. Ultimately Locke fumbled through the writer's fingers and I just didn't care what happened to him.

And the Island itself. What a wasted opportunity. The Island should have been bigger than everyone. The murderous usurping villains especially. A companion scene to Walt and Vince under the clouds should have been the last human dying on the Island and then the Island exhaling a long strong enormous huge breath of relief.